In Which Rafe Reaches Out With One Hand

Nicholas Rafe, on a handkerchief and in blood:

PEN AND PAPER TELL NOBODY

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Jem Tarpley, prison guard, to Nicholas Rafe:

There is only one pen in the guardroom here so it will have to be tomorrow if nobody is to know. I am willing to help you if it is for personal use, but I cannot undertake to deliver messages.

Jem Tarpley

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Nicholas Rafe to Jem Tarpley:

Have no fear; the only messages I want to send are to you. It is fortunate for me that I write with my left hand; your master did me a favor by taking the right hand instead, though I doubt he thought of it that way. Had he known it, though, the worst punishment he had for me was neither the torture nor the maiming but the hell I live in here – solitary confinement. I am both vain and easily bored, and I have trouble convincing myself that I am alive without others to tell me so. This tedium of staring at a single barred window in a heavy iron door, with nothing to call the hours of the day except two meals of bread and water and a daily visit from a mumbling surgeon, is more torture than the whip.

Forgive me for venturing to make myself known to you; I give you the compliment of assuming that it would not be unwelcome. I am accustomed to the faces of jailers – I have been in captivity before – but you must know that yours is different. You have what your colleagues the world over have lost: the spark of humanity, and it allowed me to fight for life in that disgusting room when it would have been so easy to die.

I know it will be noticed if we speak, but do write to me if you are willing to save a soul. Write in friendship; write in enmity; write in gibberish; it is all the same to me. But do write.

Nicholas Rafe

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Jem Tarpley to Nicholas Rafe:

Master Rafe,

I didn’t mean to answer your letter and I won’t be able to write again – what I am writing now would probably be considered treason. But I had to tell you – I am glad, not sorry, to see that Master Bleake did not manage to break you. So many men have entered this place with honor and courage and left it twisted, if at all. I thought that there was no man alive who would be able to preserve his dignity in circumstances such as yours, much less his sense of humor. I will always be grateful to you for proving me wrong.

Jem Tarpley

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Nicholas Rafe to Jem Tarpley:

My dear Tarpley,

If I didn’t already have ample reason for my low opinion of Mortimer Bleake, I would despise him now for imposing such tragic cynicism on one so young. It is kind of you to admire my stubborn quixotry, but that is all it is; when a normal human is subjected to intolerable pain, he does whatever he must to make it stop. And he is logical; the man who would rather preserve his insouciance in such a situation is a fool. Ah, well, I wear the title proudly.

In any case, your problem is not with the quality of the men you see but in the circumstances to which you subject them. If you treat a man with dignity, he is a dignified man; if you treat him bestially, he is a beast. In Bentlefay, all our prisoners are dignified, so I have not had a chance to become cynical – or is that too partisan a point to make among friends?

You must not mind my mischief; I am out of my mind with boredom and I must strike a spark somewhere. It is a poor exchange for your kindness, and I apologize.

Yours,
Nicholas Rafe

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Jem Tarpley to Nicholas Rafe:

Master Rafe,

You argue very persuasively that you are a fool, and I’m not clever enough to refute you, but I can at least continue to disagree. Your point about dignified treatment is well taken, but even the dignified prisoners of Bentlefay would bend under the treatment you have had at our hands, and you have not bent, so I reserve my right to continue to admire you, foolishness or not. If you were a fool, I wouldn’t continue to write you letters, in opposition to my intention, my orders and my oath – I hope that convinces you.

In the spirit of dignified treatment, do you have everything you require? I can’t get you silk cushions and imported fruit, but I don’t think the sergeant would object to a few books and a little more variation in diet. I will get you whatever you ask within reason, as long as alleviating your boredom doesn’t stop our correspondence. I find myself changed by your letters – I can’t quite say how – I think it is something in you. You said in your first letter that you need others to remind you that you are alive, so I will: you are more alive than anyone I’ve ever known, and perhaps the first real person I have met since I came to this place.

Jem Tarpley

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